If people are looking for a redundant, poorly written, celebration of clichés set to droning unskilled instrumentals, Here and Now would be flying off record store shelves.
Upon releasing their sixth album, Nickelback has shown the world that they have, in fact, run out of ideas. With cliché, recycled lyrics, formulaic writing, and weak instrumentals, these ageing Canadian imports should retire to their native wilderness where only the lone arctic fox must suffer their sad attempt at music.
The album plays to every rehashed rock theme imaginable – sex, drugs, anger – and manages to perform them all with the unchanged, dull tune that predominated their earlier works.
The opening track, "This is War," kicks off the album's monotony with the regular verse-chorus-verse layout complete with quick and easy rhyming hooks. The quartet fills in the background with the same elementary drums heard throughout the record, making their call to arms more like a lazy stroll in the suburbs than the angry rant it was intended to be.
With halfhearted attempts at metaphors so dreadful a fifth grade teacher would cry, Nickelback fails to class up their crude idolizations of sex and alcohol. A truckstop, beer-swilling mentality rules "Gotta Get Me Some," which harbors lines like "She's a scene from a Baywatch rerun / Hotter then the barrel on a squeeze machine gun," throwing the rockers into the country music realm, only without the overbearing patriotism.
The mid section of the CD holds tracks so lackluster the band won't be walking on a red carpet again for a long time. A quick listen to a trio of mediocre tracks is all that is needed to sum up the album. "When We Stand Together" fills in its sparse anti-war/violence lyrics with tiresome and trite "hey, yeah," "Lullaby" rips lines from any classic anti-suicide song, while "Midnight Queen" must surely have been written during some sort of testosterone overload.
Here and Now seems to be Nickelback's attempt to keep their inexplicable popularity through generic, mainstream tunes that lack any true meaning or intrinsic value. Listeners need only to own one or two songs of their discography to gain a full understanding of Nickelback's skills.
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